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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Trump Claims Strait Will Be ‘Permanently Toll-Free’ Under Agreement With Iran
In a call to The New York Times, President Trump praised Russia’s and China’s leaders and described Israel’s prime minister as “a very difficult guy.”
By David E. Sanger
David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents and written on the Iranian nuclear program for more than 20 years. He reported from London, where President Trump reached him to describe the administration’s agreement with Tehran.
Published June 14, 2026, Updated June 15, 2026
“President Trump said in an interview on Sunday afternoon that the agreement he had reached with Iran would ultimately assure that the Strait of Hormuz was “permanently toll-free,” and asserted that, despite the objections of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, he had saved Israel from nuclear obliteration. Mr. Trump also insisted that if Iran failed to reach a final nuclear accord with the United States — a process that his aides say they expect will begin on Friday in Switzerland — he would restart military attacks on Tehran or make the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues. …Mr. Trump’s assertion that the United States would, if necessary, become a paid police force for the Middle East would be a striking, if very Trumpian, departure. The president would, in effect, be turning American protection of the region — and the U.S. nuclear umbrella — into a mercenary force, there in return for profit. The arrangement would essentially reject the post-World War II American tradition, in which the United States used its power to assure global peace and prosperity.”
President Trump insisted on Sunday that if Iran failed to reach a final nuclear accord with the United States, he would restart military attacks on Tehran. Eric Lee for The New York Times
President Trump said in an interview on Sunday afternoon that the agreement he had reached with Iran would ultimately assure that the Strait of Hormuz was “permanently toll-free,” and asserted that, despite the objections of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, he had saved Israel from nuclear obliteration.
Mr. Trump also insisted that if Iran failed to reach a final nuclear accord with the United States — a process that his aides say they expect will begin on Friday in Switzerland — he would restart military attacks on Tehran or make the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues.
In a 28-minute phone conversation that Mr. Trump initiated from the White House residence, and a brief follow-up call, the president contended that his decision to attack Iran in late February, and his subsequent naval blockade of its ports after Tehran closed the strait, had remade the Middle East in America’s favor.
Speaking on his 80th birthday, as his family could be heard gathering in the background for a celebratory dinner, he praised two authoritarians — Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — for aiding in the settlement, or at least not interfering in the blockade of the Strait.
“He was a total gentleman,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Xi, whom he visited in China last month. “He didn’t send a tanker, along with 20 destroyers on each side of it, to try and break up the blockade,” an act that would have put the Chinese and American navies into potential conflict.
But he excoriated Mr. Netanyahu for mounting attacks that nearly derailed the final agreement.
“He’s a very difficult guy,” Mr. Trump said of the Israeli prime minister, “and to be honest with you, he should be very thankful to us for doing this. Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours.”
Mr. Trump’s assertion that the United States would, if necessary, become a paid police force for the Middle East would be a striking, if very Trumpian, departure. The president would, in effect, be turning American protection of the region — and the U.S. nuclear umbrella — into a mercenary force, there in return for profit. The arrangement would essentially reject the post-World War II American tradition, in which the United States used its power to assure global peace and prosperity.
It is not the first time Mr. Trump has suggested such arrangements in various parts of the world. But pressed on Sunday on whether he had won the agreement of Gulf states to such an arrangement — including American allies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — he did not offer a direct answer, suggesting instead that he had just begun to discuss the issue. It would only happen, he suggested, if Iran remained an adversary.
Mr. Trump described Iran’s current leadership, including the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, as pragmatists. It was a vastly different tone from the one he took on the opening day of the war, when he urged the Iranian people to rise up and take over their government once the American and Israeli bombing was complete. He acknowledged that he had said that, but went on to note that the Iranian people did not have access to arms — and would be slaughtered if they tried.
But he insisted that if Iran’s leaders killed protesters, it would prevent them from getting full sanctions relief and access to $25 billion in frozen funds. That requirement, however, is apparently nowhere in the current text of the memorandum of understanding, and it is not clear how central it would be to the next negotiation.
While the text of the agreement has not yet been published, Mr. Trump seemed to be describing Iranian concessions that the country has not yet made, or that have been kicked to the follow-up negotiations. The memorandum of understanding, for example, suspends tolls in the strait for only 60 days, and then promises a regional dialogue about the future. Iran had never charged tolls before the war, so the president is essentially celebrating a return to the prewar status quo.
Mr. Trump repeatedly compared his new memorandum of understanding to the 2015 agreement reached between President Barack Obama and Iran’s leadership, maintaining that his agreement would assure that Iran “cannot develop or purchase a nuclear weapon.” Iran agreed to that when it first ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970, and reaffirmed that agreement on the first page of the Obama-era accord.
Over the past three months of negotiations, led by the president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, the Iranians insisted that they would never give up their right to enrich uranium under that treaty. Mr. Trump said they were still negotiating over whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years. Mr. Trump hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension, but did not want to negotiate via the press.
He also insisted that Iran would be forever limited to enriching at low levels that “could never be used by the military.”
“They can never go beyond a certain amount,” he said. But when asked whether that limit was the same as in the Obama-era agreement — which limited enrichment to 3.67 percent, a level that is usable in power reactors but not weaponry — he said only that the new accord would assure that “they can only enrich for nonmilitary purposes. Forever.”
In both of these areas, Mr. Trump appeared to be celebrating Iranian concessions on issues that will be on the negotiating table in Switzerland — as they were in February, when Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner were conducting negotiations nearly until the bombing started on Feb. 28.
But Mr. Trump knows that the details will be compared with what the Obama administration negotiated, without launching a war that killed hundreds or thousands of Iranians (and more than a dozen Americans). It is clearly an issue that Mr. Trump is sensitive about: Just before calling The Times he posted a criticism of Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, for suggesting that Mr. Obama got more out of his negotiation than Mr. Trump did.
“We negotiated from strength,” Mr. Trump said. “He was basically paying them off.”
Mr. Trump insisted, as his aides have, that Iran would receive no relief from sanctions or release of its frozen financial assets until it delivered on its commitments.
He maintained that he was in no rush to get the near-bomb-grade fuel out of its underground sites, where much of it is buried after the United States dropped bunker-busting bombs on Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan, all major nuclear facilities, a year ago.
He said the United States would, over time, join with Iran in “down-blending” the enriched nuclear material, which would bring it to reactor-grade. But he offered no deadline and sounded vague about the timing.
Mr. Trump insisted that it was the missile and bombing attacks on Iran that had made the difference. “They did not want the third attack,” he said. “They do care about living.”
“The bottom line is that those attacks that we made had a huge impact on having this deal made, a huge impact.”
Iran complied with that enrichment limit during Mr. Obama’s time in office and into Mr. Trump’s first term. But after Mr. Trump terminated the deal, Tehran’s leader ordered enrichment at far higher levels — including near-bomb-grade uranium enriched to 60 percent that became the focus of the deepest concerns. It could be turned quickly into fuel for 10 to 12 nuclear weapons.
In the interview, Mr. Trump insisted that the United States would ultimately work with Iran to excavate, down-blend and remove all 12 tons of enriched nuclear fuel that it possesses. In the Obama deal, 97 percent of the country’s stockpile was shipped to Russia.
Mr. Trump also suggested that the United States would have what he called “strong policing powers” to make sure that Iran was not conducting nuclear work in violation of any of its commitments. He said that the previous deal allowed inspection demands to stretch out for months, but that the accord he is striking would provide for near-instant access. Iran has not spoken publicly about any such agreement.
In the course of the conversation, the president sounded in a celebratory mood, talking about the Ultimate Fighting Championship event being held on the South Lawn of the White House on Sunday evening and the possibility that it could be interrupted by rain. “This happens in wartime,” he said.
Mr. Trump spoke just hours before he was scheduled to leave for the Group of 7 summit in France, and the announcement is bound to transform the tenor of the meeting. While American allies almost universally opposed the American and Israeli attack — and Britain initially triggered Mr. Trump’s ire by not allowing bombers to participate in the first waves from its bases — the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Britain welcomed the new agreement in a statement.
“This is a moment of opportunity to restore regional stability and stabilize the global economy,” they wrote. “It is now vital that the detailed negotiations are concluded and this agreement is implemented rapidly and comprehensively. We are ready to support that effort.”
In his conversation, Mr. Trump was dismissive of the European allies’ initial responses, but said he would welcome them to join now, even while suggesting that it was a little late.
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2) Frustrated by Courts, Trump Weighed Suspending a Constitutional Right
Secret memos show that the White House debated last year, to a greater degree than previously known, whether to limit habeas corpus rights for undocumented immigrants.
By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, June 15, 2026
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who cover the White House, are the authors of the forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”
Last spring, Will Scharf, an arch-conservative lawyer serving as the White House staff secretary, wrote a secret memo to the chief of staff that reflected growing unease in the West Wing about one of the extreme measures being weighed by Stephen Miller, the powerful adviser driving President Trump’s deportation campaign.
Dated April 29, 2025, and stamped “confidential,” the memo was careful and lawyerly but amounted to a warning against end-running the rule of law. The subject line read: “THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS.”
Habeas corpus — the centuries-old right to force the government to justify, before a judge, why it has locked a person up — is enshrined in Article I of the Constitution. Mr. Scharf’s memo, in its unassuming way, was a blinking red warning light. The second Trump White House was deliberating an explosive new claim of presidential power: the suspension of habeas rights for unauthorized immigrants.
The suspension of habeas corpus has occurred just a handful of times in U.S. history, and always under the most dire circumstances of war or invasion. Yet to a greater degree than previously known, administration officials, encouraged by Mr. Trump, actively weighed taking that step in the early months of his second term — this time to accelerate the mass deportation of immigrants in the country illegally.
Flush with a decisive 2024 election victory, Mr. Trump and some members of his team wanted to test how far the emboldened president’s authority could be pushed, setting off previously unreported internal struggles over where the limits should be.
The man who outlined his concerns in the memo, Mr. Scharf, was no resistance figure. A trim, balding, Harvard-trained lawyer who had run for office in Missouri, he had bemoaned John McCain as too moderate for the 2008 Republican nomination, and believed Mr. Trump had been vindictively prosecuted after his 2020 election loss.
He had helped develop the Trump team’s legal arguments behind the successful effort to get the Mar-a-Lago classified documents indictment thrown out, as well as the arguments behind the presidential immunity case that prevailed at the Supreme Court. He had embraced the most contentious elements of Mr. Trump’s agenda, but was quickly coming up against the limit of what the Constitution, in his reading, could be made to bear.
The Constitution, Mr. Scharf wrote in his memo to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, permits suspension of habeas corpus only in cases of rebellion or invasion. Courts have almost uniformly held that only Congress can do it.
He added: “Even where Congress has explicitly suspended habeas corpus rights, the Supreme Court has held that some alternative process must be provided to defendants, with procedural safeguards akin to a habeas corpus action.”
“It prevents, in effect, governmental actors from detaining, imprisoning or executing individuals arbitrarily,” Mr. Scharf wrote.
In early April last year, the Supreme Court had allowed the administration to continue its use of the Alien Enemies Act as the basis for deporting Venezuelans who were in the United States illegally. But the justices also ruled that the migrants were entitled to challenge their deportations in court before being expelled. The detainees, the court held, could file lawsuits citing habeas corpus to challenge the basis for their removal, substantially slowing the administration’s deportation drive.
Inside the White House, Mr. Miller, the influential deputy chief of staff, saw an opening for an idea he had raised previously: What if Mr. Trump simply claimed the power to suspend habeas corpus?
Then the locked-up immigrants would be blocked from receiving hearings or even from seeking court orders to prevent their removal from the country. This was an opportunity for Mr. Trump not only to speed up deportations, but also to assert vastly expanded power over a legal system that was getting in his way.
Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas Mr. Miller had been pushing that alarmed Mr. Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.
Mr. Scharf wrote confidential memos to Ms. Wiles on both topics, setting out in a low-key way why taking either step would shatter historical norms and likely precipitate hazardous legal and constitutional battles. A senior administration official, speaking on background because the official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said for this article that “senior staff” had requested the memos, and that they were seen by relatively few people.
But the documents reflected alarm among a small group of senior aides. They felt that Mr. Miller’s eagerness to test the limits of executive power — and to accuse other branches of encroaching on it, echoing a president who bristled at any constraint — risked steering the administration, and the country, in a dangerous direction.
In the case of the Insurrection Act, Vice President JD Vance pushed to invoke it just days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a Minnesota critical care nurse who was protesting the administration’s immigration policies.
The details of internal debates over how aggressive Mr. Trump should be in seeking to deport millions of immigrants and crack down on those protesting his policies are drawn from reporting for a forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”
In reporting the book, the authors spoke with Mr. Trump and conducted more than 1,000 interviews with a wide range of people close to him, including campaign officials, White House staff members, officials serving in government departments and agencies, former aides, donors, lawmakers, friends and business associates.
In a statement provided for this article, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said, “Members of the administration often have conversations about many different lawful options to implement the president’s agenda — with the president always being the ultimate decider.”
A Dangerous New Line
At the center of the internal White House debates over suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act were Mr. Miller, intent on pushing the limits of the constitutional system, and Mr. Scharf, a process-driven lawyer little known outside the West Wing.
As the staff secretary, Mr. Scharf was the final stop for paperwork flowing through the White House before it reached the president’s desk. Among other duties, his office processed the executive actions and presidential memorandums behind what became known as the “retribution” agenda.
But Mr. Scharf belonged to a small group inside the administration that, while supportive of the president’s agenda, was quietly trying to pull him back from the more aggressive moves pushed by Mr. Miller and others — actions that promised Mr. Trump quick results but kept producing costly entanglements in court.
Their worry was self-inflicted damage: Weak legal arguments would invite sweeping rulings against the administration, and those rulings would constrain everything that came after. Mr. Scharf was not alone in his concerns about suspending habeas rights. David Warrington, the White House counsel, had told colleagues he was skeptical of some of Mr. Miller’s views of executive authority. Some figures in the White House privately called suspending habeas corpus “insane.”
Mr. Miller, according to West Wing officials, had at first tried to charm Mr. Scharf, but soon came to see him as an obstacle. Weeks after the inauguration, he was issuing sharp directives to Mr. Scharf’s office about how it should operate.
When it came to suspending habeas corpus, one of the most powerful constitutional protections of individual rights, Mr. Miller was in effect encouraging something Mr. Trump had long dreamed of: bypassing judges in deportation cases.
The president was interested. He asked advisers about Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas rights during the Civil War. Mr. Miller directed the Justice Department to study the issue.
The Trump administration was not known for encouraging or tolerating internal dissent. But Mr. Scharf put his concerns down in writing as aides realized the discussion was becoming serious.
“The history of habeas corpus dates back to the very dawn of English common law,” he recorded in his memo to Ms. Wiles. “Denial of habeas corpus rights was a key grievance underlying the American Revolution, and the right to apply to the federal courts for habeas review dates to the beginning of the republic.”
Throughout U.S. history, Mr. Scharf wrote, all three branches of government had been loath to interfere with habeas corpus, “doing so only in the direst of circumstances, and typically with respect to very limited categories of individuals.”
Habeas corpus had been formally suspended only four times, most recently after Pearl Harbor. In every case, the country was at war or facing armed rebellion. Only Lincoln, at the start of the Civil War, had ever claimed the power without congressional authorization, and only during a long congressional recess.
Mr. Scharf cited President George W. Bush, whose expansive claims of executive power helped lay the groundwork for Mr. Trump’s second term. Mr. Bush had claimed that he could indefinitely imprison terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, and that no court had jurisdiction to hear their habeas petitions. But in a landmark 2008 case, the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees still had a constitutional right to file such lawsuits.
“The upshot of these cases is that for all persons held in de facto U.S. territory, habeas rights apply, or in the limited circumstance of military detainees, an adequate alternative to habeas must be provided,” Mr. Scharf concluded.
Mr. Scharf did not say what Mr. Trump should do. But the implication was plain. Suspension of habeas rights without congressional authorization would almost certainly be found unlawful, and the court fight would become a huge, self-inflicted distraction.
The day after Mr. Scharf sent the memo to Ms. Wiles, Mr. Trump publicly alluded for the first time to his consideration of taking that drastic step.
“There’s one way that’s been used by three very highly respected presidents,” he said during a cabinet meeting, referring to his options for going around the courts in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national who had been living in Maryland and had been wrongly deported to a notorious terrorism prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. “But we hope we don’t have to go that route,” Mr. Trump added.
When CNN later reported that Mr. Trump’s cabinet comments referred to suspending habeas corpus, and that the president was directly involved in the discussions, Mr. Miller addressed reporters outside the West Wing.
“The Constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Mr. Miller said. “So it’s an option we are actively looking at.”
Mr. Miller was intentional about his choice of words. The president had been trying to recast the immigration surge across the southern border during the Biden years as an invasion by enemy forces — a highly dubious claim intended to unlock extraordinary powers, intended only for wartime, to repel the migrants. Mr. Miller kept using the word “invasion” even after border crossings had fallen to multidecade lows.
“Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” Mr. Miller added to the reporters, a not-so-subtle warning to federal judges to give the president the leeway he was seeking.
After weeks of uproar, and disagreement between government officials on whether it could be done, the proposal eventually faded from view. Asked about it later, Mr. Trump appeared to acknowledge discussing suspending habeas corpus, but downplayed that the discussions were serious, and suggested it was not worth doing so just then.
“If you’re going to do that, that’s a big one,” Mr. Trump said. Referring to Mr. Abrego Garcia, he said, “You wouldn’t do it for that particular person.”
Mr. Trump got some of what he wanted anyway, through a bureaucratic sleight of hand.
For nearly 30 years, immigration laws had been interpreted with a clear distinction between people stopped at the border and people arrested inside the country. Many of those apprehended at the border could be held in mandatory detention without a hearing. But those arrested inside the United States — including people who had been living in the country, some for years or decades — often faced an easier path to appear before an immigration judge and request release on bond.
In July 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials made a crucial shift. From that point on, the administration would treat immigrants arrested inside the United States, including those who had been in the country for years, as if they had just been stopped at the border, meaning they could be held without a bond hearing. The vast majority of detained migrants would not qualify to see a judge, because asylum claims at the border had been so restricted.
Many federal judges ruled against the new interpretation, but the administration frequently ignored them. Even without overtly taking away a fundamental right that would affect millions of people, Mr. Miller’s team had found a way to gum up the legal works for many migrants for months on end.
Confronting the ‘Enemy Within’
With the suspension of habeas corpus seemingly off the table for the time being, the administration was still weighing another explosive use of executive authority: invoking the Insurrection Act. This was an action that Mr. Trump had often mused about in his first term, but had never taken.
The renewed pressure came from a corner of the White House that grew ascendant last fall. The September 2025 assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk had galvanized Mr. Vance and Mr. Miller — longtime allies on the question of left-wing political violence — to broaden federal investigations of domestic terrorism to encompass a wider range of progressive groups.
By winter, the second Trump White House saw itself at war against “an enemy within” the United States, and the courts were not the only battleground.
Efforts by activists to impede roundups of immigrants were accelerating in some cities, in some cases drawing crowds onto the streets. The protests prompted renewed discussions inside the administration about the Insurrection Act.
Most West Wing aides agreed that there had been moments during the George Floyd protests of 2020 when use of the Insurrection Act might have been defensible. But what was happening on the ground in 2025 in response to the administration’s immigration policies bore no resemblance to the upheaval and destruction of that summer.
For Mr. Trump, the question of how to handle protesters became entangled in what he had long sought to portray — often with wild exaggeration — as an epidemic of violent crime in Democratic-led cities. His solution was to put troops on the streets, at least in the form of the National Guard. It was an instinct that had begun to harden over the summer after a young staffer in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operation was beaten up on a street in Washington.
The Insurrection Act empowers the president to deploy military forces to quell widespread unrest and assist state law enforcement. Once again, Mr. Miller was the chief instigator, pressing the president to invoke it. He was pushing on an open door: Mr. Trump had for decades been drawn to the idea of domestic military deployments.
When the president began publicly threatening to do just that — to use the Insurrection Act to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling barring his deployment of the National Guard to Illinois over the governor’s objections — Mr. Scharf wrote another confidential memo.
“The Insurrection Act serves as a break-the-glass exception to the traditional, general prohibition on the use of the military in the domestic setting,” Mr. Scharf wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 29, tracing the history of its use.
The most recent use was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of a Black man, Rodney King, triggered six days of destruction that left 63 people dead, nearly 2,400 injured, and whole blocks of the city in flames.
The 1992 deployment had come, as Mr. Scharf noted, at the request of California’s governor. What Mr. Miller was pushing — and the president was eager to do — had no precedent under these relatively-peaceful circumstances.
“Most legal analysts agree that the Insurrection Act does provide the president with exceptionally broad powers and authority, essentially unreviewable by the other branches of government,” Mr. Scharf wrote.
But he cautioned that it would almost certainly be challenged in court the moment it was invoked, slowing the process and “potentially obviating any advantage to be gained in terms of the flexibility that it would provide to the president.”
Privately, Mr. Scharf stressed to colleagues that suspending habeas corpus for immigrants and invoking the Insurrection Act without genuine need were two steps the White House could not afford to take.
But as the administration pushed ICE deeper into cities, and as protests against the president’s immigration policies intensified in response, the pull of the idea remained strong for some in the West Wing.
An Insurrection Act Debate
The discussion came to a head in late January. Federal agents had shot and killed two U.S. citizens who had been voicing their opposition to the administration’s deportation policies in Minnesota — Renee Good, a poet and mother of three, on Jan. 7, and Mr. Pretti, an intensive care nurse, on Jan. 24. The ensuing protests had grown into the most intense unrest of Mr. Trump’s second term. Mr. Miller and other senior officials accused Ms. Good of “domestic terrorism,” and Mr. Miller called Mr. Pretti an “assassin.”
Yet a few days after the Pretti killing, and even as the administration was moving to de-escalate the situation, Mr. Vance walked into Ms. Wiles’s West Wing office shortly after 9 a.m. for the regular senior staff meeting, and took a seat at the end of her long conference table.
Attendance was lighter than usual. Mr. Miller sat to his right, his back to the windows overlooking West Executive Avenue. Mr. Scharf sat at the opposite end of the table. Mr. Warrington, the White House counsel, was beside the vice president. Ms. Wiles took her customary wingback chair near the fireplace. Her deputy, James Blair, took the other.
Mr. Vance got to the point. They needed to invoke the Insurrection Act, swiftly, to crush the unrest in Minnesota. It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send — that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations — would make sure no one tried it again. (There was no evidence that either Mr. Pretti or Ms. Good had been paid activists.)
Mr. Scharf spoke next. Without referring to the confidential memo he had sent Ms. Wiles in October, he laid out his objection: The law, as he understood it, simply did not fit the circumstances on the ground.
Mr. Miller, unusually subdued, pushed back only mildly. The boundaries of the Insurrection Act, he suggested, had never really been tested.
“That’s not true, Stephen,” Mr. Scharf said. “It’s very prescriptive.”
Someone noted the use of the law in 1992. Someone else made the obvious rejoinder: This was not the L.A. riots.
Then Mr. Blair weighed in with the political case. The scenes of federal agents in Minnesota already looked chaotic, he said, and the public was recoiling. He put three questions to the room: What does the Insurrection Act give us that we don’t already have? What changes on the ground would be worth the heat? What else could they win that would justify the public relations cost?
The room was quiet. Nobody had a good answer.
For weeks, Ms. Wiles, the chief of staff, had been fielding calls from elected officials and business leaders about Minnesota. After Mr. Pretti was killed, she had pointedly told colleagues that the reason for sending federal agents to Minneapolis had been “to arrest people who were getting federal benefits wrongly. This is what we went to Minnesota for. And we are so far off that mission.”
But as was often her way in charged discussions, she said little now, giving the others the floor.
From his seat on the couch, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, laid out the public relations problem. Mr. Vance, having heard the arguments, appeared to soften. Perhaps now was not the time.
The meeting broke up without a decision — a vague consensus to keep thinking about it. But it had been clarifying in its own way. Even after the administration’s posture had helped escalate tensions in Minnesota, even with the blowback mounting, the vice president and Mr. Miller were still searching for a reason to put federal troops on American streets.
Under immense public pressure, the administration would subsequently take a different course of action. The most vocal immigration hard-liner, Gregory Bovino, the Customs and Border Protection commander-at-large, was removed from his post, and the administration held back on ICE pushes in cities in the weeks after Mr. Pretti’s death.
Yet just as the idea of suspending habeas corpus was set aside but never fully abandoned by some inside the White House, the Insurrection Act, at least in the eyes of its proponents, would remain a loaded weapon in a West Wing eager to test the limits of presidential power.
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3) How an Addictive Gas Station Drug Found Allies in Trump’s Cabinet
With support from Markwayne Mullin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the kratom industry is pursuing a potentially lucrative policy. Mr. Mullin owns equity in a company that could benefit.
By Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett, June 15, 2026
Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett have covered special interest lobbying to shape government policies related to health care and public safety.
For years, federal health officials have warned about the risks associated with a supplement derived from the leaves of kratom trees that adherents say can kill pain or boost energy. Sold in gas stations across America, kratom has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures and thousands of deaths.
Powerful figures close to President Trump, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, pushed to downplay those concerns.
Mr. Mullin, until recently a Republican senator from Oklahoma, played a key role in a sprawling influence campaign spearheaded by the kratom industry that courted Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vice President JD Vance, among others in the Trump administration, an investigation by The New York Times found.
Only when he was nominated by Mr. Trump in March to lead the Homeland Security Department did it become clear that Mr. Mullin had a financial connection to the supplement. In a disclosure statement, he listed an investment worth as much as $1 million in a kratom company, Botanic Tonics, that could benefit from the changes he has sought.
The company’s founder, Jerry W. Ross — who had been an energy executive in Mr. Mullin’s home state before pleading guilty to a financial crime — is a leading player in the influence campaign that was devised to benefit kratom at the expense of its rivals in the marketplace. The kratom campaign underscores how corporations in the growing wellness industry can gain traction in Mr. Trump’s government by casting risky products as aligned with the administration’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, agenda championed by Mr. Kennedy, who has sometimes prioritized unproven remedies over science.
In July, while still a senator, Mr. Mullin showed up at a Food and Drug Administration news conference and endorsed proposed federal restrictions on more powerful synthetic supplements that compete with kratom for shelf space. In explaining his position, Mr. Mullin pointed to a history of addiction in his family, though health experts say kratom products have also been shown to be addictive.
His disclosure form did not indicate when he acquired his stake in Botanic Tonics, but he has not filed paperwork to indicate that he has divested from it.
The Homeland Security Department did not answer questions about the investment. In a statement, the department said that Mr. Mullin “follows all ethics and conflict of interest standards and has not lobbied for any individual or company.”
The restrictions that Mr. Mullin supported on the synthetic products would have been a boon to Mr. Ross’s company and others in the kratom industry, which market their supplements as safer and more natural. The kratom companies used donations and lobbyists to push for the crackdown.
“It’s not pay to play. It’s pay to have conversations. It’s pay to have a chance at the table,” Ryan Niddel, the chief executive of Diversified Botanics, another kratom company involved in the effort, said in an interview with The Times. “And anybody that considers any of the lobbying work or any of the governmental work that goes on being different than that, I think has their head buried in the sand at this point.
“I mean, that is the world that we live in.”
The Times’s investigation — drawn from campaign finance data, lobbying disclosures, court filings, private correspondence and dozens of interviews — found the following:
Mr. Ross ramped up his donations to Mr. Kennedy’s defunct presidential campaign after Mr. Trump chose him to be health secretary. Mr. Ross privately boasted that he was “working on a plan for Bobby.”
The F.D.A. in 2025 deleted links on its kratom webpage that detailed a then-pending legal case against Mr. Ross’s company, Botanic Tonics, after his allies pushed for the change.
Botanic Tonics had been sued by the federal government for illegally selling kratom products that were not proven safe, which the company disputed. But in December, the Justice Department suddenly moved to drop the case — which the company celebrated as a sign of the federal government’s receptiveness to kratom.
Mr. Kennedy, as health secretary, called the governor of Ohio to try to head off a state ban on kratom in the fall of 2025. Months later, Botanic Tonics donated $1 million to a political committee associated with Mr. Kennedy.
Mr. Ross, joined by the influential lobbyist Ches McDowell, used donations to secure a private audience with Mr. Vance to lobby him about the benefits of kratom and to urge the ban on the synthetic products.
Kush Desai, a spokesman for the White House, suggested the administration was not swayed by the influence campaign, even though Mr. Trump recently made comments about needing to address the matter.
“The only guiding factor behind the Trump administration’s health care policymaking is gold standard science,” he said in a statement. The administration, he added, was working “to get this critical matter correct and ensure the health and safety of Americans.”
The Health and Human Services Department and Mr. Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Mr. Ross.
The administration’s receptiveness to kratom comes as Mr. Trump has also expressed a willingness to loosen rules covering other drugs backed by influence campaigns, including cannabis and psychedelics. The permissive posture stands in contrast to Mr. Trump’s baseless skepticism about highly regulated and widely used medications like Tylenol and vaccines.
“It’s looking like we have a coin-operated drug policy that basically responds to whoever will give money,” said Kevin Sabet, who worked on drug policy under Republican and Democratic presidents. “And it threatens public health and safety because it’s going around the scientific process in favor of donors and influencers.”
A Rising Scourge
Long used medicinally in Southeast Asia, the leaves of the kratom tree contain a compound called mitragynine that interacts with the brain’s opioid receptors in a manner said to produce mild pain relief and — depending on its preparation — either sedation or energy and focus.
Kratom started gaining popularity in the United States in the early 2010s as the opioid addiction epidemic raged. With doctors tightening access to powerful prescription painkillers like OxyContin, users spread the word that kratom — initially sold as a bitter-tasting powder — could produce a similar effect.
Devotees promoted it as a way to kick opioid addiction or to replace alcohol. But as reports of negative effects started rolling in, the government tried to take action.
Under the Obama administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration described kratom as “a drug and chemical of concern,” and moved to greatly restrict access by classifying it as a Schedule I drug. Doing so would have defined it as having no medicinal value, making it illegal to sell.
The proposal was withdrawn weeks later amid backlash from the fledgling industry, kratom users and members of Congress.
Another proposal to restrict access during the first Trump administration was also pulled after lobbying by an industry trade group, over the objection of Scott Gottlieb, the F.D.A. commissioner at the time.
Kratom took off, appearing on the shelves of convenience stores and vape shops as tablets, drinks and gummies. The products varied in strength, and the concentration of active ingredients on the labels was not always accurate. They could be purchased in many states without age verification.
From 2020 through 2024, kratom was found in the system of more than 5,200 people who died of drug overdoses, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on death certificates and other official reports. Though often found in combination with other drugs, one study determined that those using kratom carried a sixfold increase in the risk of overdose death.
Wyatt Wheeler was a 27-year-old pursuing a master’s degree in business at Texas Christian University. He died of an overdose in October 2022, six weeks after he started taking a kratom extract, according to his mother, Patti Wheeler.
An autopsy report issued by a county medical examiner in Fort Worth found that the cause of the overdose was the “combined toxic effects” of the active compound in kratom, along with a prescribed antidepressant and antihistamines.
Ms. Wheeler has become an anti-kratom activist, producing a documentary about the drug’s harms and pushing for state and federal restrictions.
She says the industry has used its influence to thwart safeguards.
If the federal government had effectively banned kratom earlier, Ms. Wheeler said in an interview, many overdose deaths could have been avoided.
“My son would be alive,” she said.
Feel Free
It was in this profitable but unregulated landscape that Mr. Ross set out to take the kratom industry mainstream.
It was a fresh start for Mr. Ross after his stint in federal prison.
Formerly a prominent energy executive in Oklahoma named Jerry D. Cash, he was a self-admitted heavy drinker who was charged on three occasions with driving under the influence from 2001 through 2008.
In 2010, he pleaded guilty to a federal charge related to concealing his diversion of $10 million from oil and gas companies he ran.
He was released from prison in the fall of 2013, after serving less than three years of a nine-year sentence. He was ordered to participate in substance abuse treatment and to abstain from intoxicants including alcohol, which he has said he previously used to cope with social anxiety.
Eventually, he said later on a podcast, he began to experiment with other “social lubricants” — both legal and illegal — in search of a healthier alternative. By the time he created Botanic Tonics in 2020 with a base of operations in the Tulsa area, he had changed his name. The company began selling a roughly shot-size beverage called Feel Free containing kratom and another supplement called kava.
Business boomed as Feel Free and competing products were embraced by skeptics of mainstream medicine who would become the core of the MAHA movement.
Feel Free came to be sold at more than 24,000 retailers. Through a company, Mr. Ross would eventually pay more than $30 million for an 11,000-square-foot home in Malibu overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Still, serious challenges loomed for the kratom business.
In late 2023 a more powerful synthetic product emerged, featuring elevated levels of a psychoactive compound that is also found in lower levels in natural kratom. It is called 7-OH, or 7-hydroxymitragynine.
Government and legal scrutiny of both kratom and 7-OH began mounting. While some states passed industry-endorsed laws regulating kratom, others enacted restrictions or even banned it and 7-OH entirely.
Users also began suing.
A class-action lawsuit filed in 2023 asserted that Botanic Tonics targeted recovering alcoholics with advertising casting Feel Free as a healthy, safe and sober alternative. The suit claimed that, to the contrary, the tonic had the “potential to be highly addictive.”
The lead plaintiff in the suit was a recovering alcoholic in California. He spent $3,000 a month on Feel Free, according to the suit. (They retail for about $10 a bottle.) It said he “could no longer function without Feel Free and suffered severe withdrawal symptoms when he attempted to stop,” eventually turning back to alcohol “in an effort to cope with the worsening symptoms of his Feel Free addiction.”
To settle the class action, Mr. Ross last year signed an agreement under which Botanic Tonics would pay $8.75 million and include warnings on Feel Free labels about how kratom “can become habit-forming and cause serious adverse health effects.”
The F.D.A. would eventually receive more than 965 kratom-related reports of harm, including 264 resulting in death. The self-reported claims detailed instances of vomiting, paranoia and drug withdrawal.
In 2023, F.D.A. inspectors visited Botanic Tonics’ warehouse in suburban Tulsa. They reported their findings to the Justice Department, which went to court to seize 250,000 bottles of Feel Free and other kratom supplements.
In court filings, prosecutors cited “serious safety concerns,” saying kratom had been linked to “addiction” and “liver toxicity.” They accused Botanic Tonics of engaging in illegal interstate trade of an unapproved substance.
On a podcast released in 2024, Mr. Ross indicated that he planned a campaign to differentiate between natural kratom and other versions.
“We’re going to be coming out of the chute asking for separate regulation for whole leaf kratom,” he said.
Calling a Governor
Mr. Trump’s election — and his appointment of Mr. Kennedy as health secretary days later — created an ideal environment for such a campaign.
To others working on the issue, Mr. Ross highlighted his relationship with Mr. Kennedy, indicating that he was planning to enlist the incoming secretary in efforts to influence the administration, according to one associate.
In the weeks around the inauguration, Mr. Ross donated nearly $162,000 to Mr. Kennedy’s defunct presidential campaign, exceeding by many times his total federal political giving to that point.
Mr. Ross was not the only kratom entrepreneur jockeying for position.
A newly formed group called Botanicals for Better Health and Wellness, which is linked to a rival kratom supplement maker, retained the firm of Jeff Miller, a leading Trump fund-raiser, to lobby the F.D.A., Congress and the White House. The new group donated $50,000 to the incoming president’s inaugural committee, for which Mr. Miller was finance chairman.
Mr. Miller and the group did not respond to requests for comment.
Shortly after the inauguration, another rival firm, Diversified Botanics, which produces the popular kratom brand MIT45, hired a lobbyist who worked on Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign and transition. The lobbyist helped arrange meetings with members of Congress and officials from the F.D.A. and the health department for Diversified’s chief executive, Mr. Niddel.
Mr. Niddel said he wanted to explain to government officials how his company’s products differed from those featuring 7-OH.
“We got to get in front of this,” Mr. Niddel said he recalled thinking. “It’s going to destroy the kratom industry, because an uninformed consumer or an uninformed legislator — it’s all being lumped in together.”
Vince Sanders, the founder and president of CBD American Shaman, which helped popularize 7-OH, said the kratom industry is targeting businesses like his for financial reasons, not because of moral or safety concerns.
“We’ve devastated the industry,” Mr. Sanders said. “When 7-OH came in and people tried it, they learned very quickly that it was vastly superior. I mean, this is like going from a horse and buggy to an automobile.”
Mr. Sanders’s company received a letter from the F.D.A. last year accusing it of illegally marketing 7-OH products. It recently agreed to halt sales in Missouri to settle a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general. The suit accused the company of peddling “deadly opioids,” though the company did not acknowledge liability.
Mr. Sanders believes that kratom lobbying has “demonized” his side of the industry.
Mr. Mullin used his connections in Mr. Trump’s orbit to help the other side.
Starting while he was in the Senate and continuing after he became homeland security secretary, Mr. Mullin urged officials in the health department to remove language from the F.D.A. website warning of kratom’s harms, according to four people familiar with his efforts who were not authorized to discuss them.
For the kratom industry, the warnings on the F.D.A. website were no small concern. Industry representatives said they feared state officials were taking their cues from the agency in deciding whether to pursue bans or other restrictions.
Records obtained by The Times show that the F.D.A. was asked to remove from its kratom webpage links that took readers to enforcement actions against Mr. Ross’s and other kratom companies.
By the end of 2025, the F.D.A. had removed the links.
Other requested changes were not enacted, including one asking the agency to remove a warning “not to use kratom because of the risk of serious adverse events, including liver toxicity, seizures and substance use disorder.”
Emily Hilliard, a health department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the website changes, but said the agency is “solely focused on serving the American people, not advancing industry interests.”
Mr. Mullin went public with his involvement in July.
In a notable move, he joined Mr. Kennedy and Dr. Marty Makary, then the F.D.A. commissioner, at a news briefing to announce that the agency was moving to effectively end the legal sale of synthetic 7-OH products.
In a comment that was later highlighted by a group backed by Mr. Ross, Dr. Makary said at the briefing that “we’re not targeting the kratom leaf.”
Mr. Mullin added that companies selling 7-OH were exploiting a loophole in F.D.A. regulations to cause harm to consumers.
“It’s legal, but it’s an addiction that’s ruining lives,” he said.
Mr. Kennedy referred to his own past struggles with addiction at the news briefing. Weeks later, he pushed Ohio to adopt a policy that would have protected the kratom industry.
Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, had announced a plan in August to designate all kratom products as illegal drugs. But Mr. Kennedy asked Mr. DeWine to crack down instead only on synthetic 7-OH — and not kratom leaf products. The health secretary had hoped to see states align with the federal effort, said Dan Tierney, a spokesman for the governor.
Mr. DeWine soon dropped the push to ban kratom and moved forward with an emergency prohibition against 7-OH. After a review, though, his office said it was moving ahead with a broader kratom crackdown.
‘People Are Asking for It’
Having powerful people in Mr. Trump’s cabinet vouching for kratom was not enough for Mr. Ross. He actively joined the effort to kneecap his competition.
His allies launched an opaque company to position natural kratom products as safer than synthetic alternatives.
They gave the company a name, Stop Gas Station Heroin, that made synthetics sound especially dangerous. The company hired the firm of the lobbyist Mr. McDowell, who had been introduced to Mr. Ross as a well-connected Trump insider.
Mr. McDowell, who is close to the president’s elder sons, also employs a nephew of Mr. Kennedy and the son of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita.
Stop Gas Station Heroin has paid Mr. McDowell’s firm, Checkmate Government Relations, at least $600,000, according to lobbying records.
Mr. McDowell’s firm has pushed for tougher enforcement against the rival synthetic products in meetings with congressional offices and Mr. Kennedy’s health department.
All the while, Botanic Tonics had been awaiting a ruling on its own battle with the federal government.
In December, a federal judge denied the company’s motion to dismiss the F.D.A. lawsuit accusing it of unlawfully selling kratom.
Then, less than two weeks later, federal prosecutors moved to drop the case, as reported by The Kansas City Star. They told the judge that the seized supplements had expired and that the Trump administration had “determined it would not be a prudent use of government resources to sustain this action.”
In a statement praising the decision, the company said the dismissal “reflects a maturing regulatory landscape” in which federal agencies increasingly recognize the differences between natural kratom leaf and the synthetic products.
Justin A. Lollman, a lawyer for the company, told The Times in a statement that even during the lawsuit, the government “never sought to restrict Botanic Tonics’ continued manufacture and sale of Feel Free.” The company has sold more than 130 million servings of Feel Free, he added.
In February, after the dismissal, Mr. Ross donated a total of $443,000 to the Republican National Committee in connection with a fund-raising dinner headlined by Mr. Vance in New York.
Before the dinner, Mr. Ross, accompanied by Mr. McDowell, secured a private meeting with Mr. Vance. Mr. Ross used the access to promote the benefits of natural kratom and urge the Trump administration, and particularly the D.E.A., to clamp down on 7-OH, according to two people briefed on the meeting who were not authorized to discuss it.
Mr. McDowell’s firm did not respond to a request for comment.
Over the next two months, Botanic Tonics donated $1 million to MAHA PAC, which is associated with Mr. Kennedy. The money from Botanic Tonics accounted for about 44 percent of all the funds raised by the PAC between the beginning of last year and the end of April.
The PAC did not respond to a request for comment.
It is not clear whether the administration will approve the emergency ban of 7-OH that Mr. Ross and his allies have sought.
But during a briefing in the Oval Office about maternal health care last month, Mr. Trump made a stray comment indicating the issue had reached his desk, even as his administration was grappling with higher-profile priorities including a war with Iran.
“We’re looking very seriously at natural 7-OH and getting that approved,” Mr. Trump said.
The statement left even industry insiders divided on whether he was siding with natural kratom or synthetic 7-OH, or taking another position altogether.
Whatever his stance, Mr. Trump left the impression that he had heard from influential figures on the matter, adding that “we’re looking to see if we can do something there.
“A lot of people are asking for it.”
Georgia Gee and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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4) The Iran War Permanently Altered the Global Economy
The global order has been altered, and economies are unlikely to simply pick up where they left off before the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran.
By Patricia Cohen, June 16, 2026
Patricia Cohen, who is based in London, writes about global economics and geopolitics.
Fishermen repairing a boat in the port of Tyre in southern Lebanon. The war with Iran has shaken trust in the Middle East’s peace, stability and prosperity. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
The framework deal between the United States and Iran sets the stage for an end to the bursts of violence and debilitating disruption of energy deliveries and trade in the Persian Gulf. But don’t expect economies around the globe to simply pick up where they left off before the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28.
The war has set in motion changes that will be hard to reverse.
The global energy order is being reshaped.
The near shutdown in oil and gas deliveries from the Middle East and the leap in prices are causing a shift in power. Energy producers from the Gulf to the Americas are jockeying to maintain or increase their dominance, and customers are struggling to reduce their dependency and shore up their supply.
As a result, the energy market is changing, the energy mix is changing and the energy players are changing.
The profound vulnerability of countries throughout Asia, Europe and elsewhere that depend on imported energy is supercharging the hunt for alternatives. In some places, like South Korea and Japan, that has led to an increased use of dirtier fuels like coal.
But over the longer term, this energy shock — the second in just four years — is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.
Improvements in electric battery technology and efficiency make the shift more feasible than it was when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted a global energy shock in 2022, said Daan Walter at Ember, an energy research group in London.
In many places, for instance, electric vehicles are increasingly affordable. And in April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.
“This is a big turnaround,” Mr. Walter said. “So what was five years ago maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper.”
Investments in renewables have also become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30, he said.
Relations among producers are also changing. The war heightened tensions between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and prompted the Emirates to leave the OPEC Plus oil cartel. The impact of that departure will be fully felt only when oil production in the region picks up. But a weakened Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries could add to volatility in oil markets.
The split has also encouraged the Saudis to move closer to Russia. Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, featured Saudi Arabia this month as the “guest of honor” at an economic forum in St. Petersburg.
Russia, the second-largest producer of crude oil and gas after the United States, has been strengthened in other ways by the war. The Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions imposed on Russia, allowing Moscow to pump up profits from its oil exports when its economy is ailing.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina and Guyana are building their oil production capacity as the world looks for alternative suppliers.
China is a major beneficiary.
The push to build out and diversify energy networks is going to continue long after the war ends. And China is poised to benefit most from the expected boon in renewables.
It is leagues ahead of the rest of the world in producing wind turbines, high-voltage cables, transformers, solar panels, batteries, software to manage energy flows and more.
China’s increasing role ensuring that other countries have a dependable supply of energy amplifies its strategic influence and importance.
“China looks to be an out-and-out winner,” analysts from Wood Mackenzie, a global energy consulting firm, concluded.
The Trump administration’s aggressive push to halt renewables energy projects — even paying companies to cancel wind farms — means the United States is essentially withdrawing from this global competition and ceding the industrial and technological advantage to its biggest rival.
The economic advantages are reinforced by geopolitical ones. The war has deepened the wedge between the United States and longtime allies in Europe, providing another opening for China to enlarge its role as an international leader.
Re-establishing trust will be difficult.
It is unclear whether shipping traffic will ever again be able to move freely through the Strait of Hormuz — the only sea route for moving oil, natural gas and other cargo out of the Persian Gulf.
Iran has pushed to impose fees on ships that pass through the narrow waterway, even though such a plan could violate international agreements. Even if new payments are not codified, Iran has shown it can disrupt trade any time it wants, which raises risks and costs.
“I think the strait is never going to go back to the certainty of free passage that we’ve been used to,” said Maurice Obstfeld, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
Similarly, the trust in the region’s peace, stability and growing prosperity has also been shaken.
“The dynamism of the Gulf economies may be impaired by the vulnerability they showed,” Mr. Obstfeld said, and that “raises Iran’s leverage in the region.”
Iran has hurled drones and missiles at Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and other neighbors. The damage to Qatar’s natural gas fields was extensive, affecting 17 percent of its capacity to export liquefied natural gas. In Saudi Arabia, a petrochemical complex was bombed.
For the Emirates, which has billed itself as a global financial hub, trade center and tourist attraction, attacks on its five-star hotels, data complexes and a nuclear facility could scare off visitors and investors.
As for the United States, Mr. Trump’s decision to provoke a war with Iran, combined with his chaotic policymaking, has further undermined confidence in Washington’s willingness and ability to maintain global order and commerce.
“The capacity of the U.S. as a military force has been once again shown to be limited,” Mr. Obstfeld said. And Iran’s continued resistance “is a huge blow to global faith in the U.S. as a provider of security.”
For decades, a primary mission of the U.S. Navy has been to guarantee freedom of navigation on the seas, said Mark Blyth, a political scientist at Brown University. Iran’s success in continuing to block ship traffic, though, has demonstrated that for all its might, the United States cannot ensure the seas will be open and free.
The economy has been kicked onto a path of slower growth and higher prices.
When economists at the World Bank began sifting through data early this year, they were pleasantly surprised. “We were starting to think about upgrading our forecasts, between January and February, because things were looking so good,” said Indermit Gill, the bank’s chief economist. “Inflation was coming down, growth was picking up, trade had kind of taken it on the chin and was still standing.”
No more. The bank just revised its economic outlook, lowering its forecast. It now expects global growth to decline to 2.5 percent this year from 2.9 percent in 2025.
Inflation is also starting to roar. In the United States, it rose for the third month in row, hitting an annual rate of 4.2 percent in May. And instead of planning for the next drop in interest rates, Wall Street is expecting the Federal Reserve to increase rates at least once this year. Last week, the European Central Bank raised rates to 2.25 percent. “The war in the Middle East is generating inflation pressures,” the bank said.
Higher rates have serious longer-term effects on both rich and poor countries that have already run up staggering public debts and are using a growing portion of revenue just to pay interest costs.
Those budgetary pressures are only going to increase as governments offer assistance to households struggling with higher energy prices and increase military budgets to cope with growing security threats.
Asian economies, slapped hardest by the crisis, have already inundated the Asian Development Bank for emergency loans as they seek to rescue their economies and finances from the impact of the Iran war.
“The world economy is going to end up being more jittery,” Mr. Gill said. And that is not good for long-term planning, investment or growth.
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5) Iran Will Enter Nuclear Talks Feeling Emboldened
Despite military setbacks during the war, Tehran is presenting a narrative of victory before negotiations with Washington.
By Yeganeh Torbati, June 16, 2026
A mural showing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former supreme leaders of Iran, in Tehran on Monday. Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
In the days after Iran and the United States reached a preliminary agreement to pause their war, Iranian politicians, generals, and clerics from a range of political factions described the deal as a victory that showed Tehran’s resilience against a far more powerful enemy.
That is the position Iran’s leaders are pushing even though the country lost a slew of its top political and military figures, suffered a battering to its stock of ballistic missiles and was left with an economy strained even further by a naval blockade.
“Iran has taken a major step toward final victory,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament who has played a major role in negotiating the deal, wrote on social media on Monday.
As negotiators were nearing an agreement, Sadegh Amoli Larijani, chairman of a powerful appointed council that supervises the work of the government, wrote on social media on Saturday that Iranians had shown a “renewed spirit of resistance” and defeated U.S.-Israeli plans to overthrow the Islamic republic.
Some of the backslapping is most likely aimed at presenting a united front both abroad and at home, where a vocal hard-line minority has protested the agreement as a betrayal of those killed in the war.
The comments also reflect the genuine perception of Iran’s leaders, who can point to the fact that the terms of the agreement, though still not fully known, will fall far short of what President Trump had previously declared as his goals in starting the war: “total and complete victory” for the United States and “unconditional surrender” for Iran.
The style of Iran’s leadership has also changed as a result of the war. Some pragmatic figures, such as the national security official Ali Larijani, were killed, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — the military force that defends Iran’s system of clerical rule — has consolidated power. The long-term impact of those changes is still to be seen, but the shifts raise the question of how willing the military, now even more powerful, will be to make serious concessions at the negotiating table.
Mr. Trump’s rhetoric also appears to be adding to Iranian leaders’ confident tone. The American president has publicly excoriated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for mounting attacks on Lebanon that nearly derailed the U.S.-Iran deal, and he has described Iran’s current leadership, including the supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, as pragmatists.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said Iran’s leadership was now “rational,” compared to, in his view, the leaders who were killed at the outset of the war.
According to Mr. Trump’s account of the deal, Iran is to allow shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — a return to the status quo before the war. But in what is perhaps an indication of the leverage Iran feels it has, Tehran has indicated that it intends to charge ships for passing through the strait, which it did not do before the war.
“Iran is certain to be emboldened by this deal,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an Iran expert at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “I cannot recall another instance in which Iran suffered such serious military setbacks yet emerged with what could be considered a diplomatic victory.”
In Iran, much of this narrative is a familiar one, honed during eight years of war with Iraq. That war, which began in 1980, was framed by Iranian officials as an underdog struggle against a foreign invader and its powerful allies.
Iran may have achieved more now than it did in the aftermath of that war, said Hamidreza Azizi, an Iranian security expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
“For the first time, its role in the Strait of Hormuz has, to some extent, been de facto recognized, while regional countries appear to be seeking accommodation with Iran rather than confrontation,” he said.
Iranian negotiators have even felt emboldened enough to insist that Lebanon, where Israel has been fighting Iran’s ally Hezbollah, be included in the agreement, Mr. Azizi added. Iran has claimed the deal would extend to stopping fighting in Lebanon, though Israel has pushed back, saying its forces would remain there.
“The Iranian leadership sees itself as being able to dictate terms that, in its view, should be binding not only on the United States but on Israel as well,” Mr. Azizi said.
The agreement punted the most vexing disputes between Iran and the United States — the fate of the Iranian nuclear program and what kind of sanctions relief the country should receive in return for limiting it — to later rounds of talks, expected to begin on Friday in Switzerland.
With Iran entering those talks feeling confident, its negotiators may be unwilling to make compromises on the key points of disagreement, including the future of Iran’s current stockpile of enriched uranium.
“The nuclear negotiations will be the real test of the durability of this arrangement,” Mr. Boroujerdi said. “If tensions in the Strait of Hormuz have subsided by that stage, Trump may find it more difficult to extract major concessions from Tehran.”
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6) Europe Stayed Out of the U.S.-Iran War. Now It’s ‘Ready to Act.’
For months, a coalition led by Britain and France has been preparing to send minesweepers and other ships to secure the strait once the fighting ends. That moment may finally be here.
By Michael D. Shear, Reporting from London, June 16, 2026
The German minesweeper Fulda may be deployed to the Strait of Hormuz. Gregor Fischer/Getty Images
European nations are poised to send ships into the Strait of Hormuz to protect shipping — but not until they are convinced that the new cease-fire between the United States and Iran is working.
Italian minesweepers are stationed off the coast of Djibouti in East Africa. A German minesweeper and a logistical support ship are in the eastern Mediterranean. France’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is a two- or three-day sail from the strait. Britain has sent a destroyer, the Dragon, to the region, to be ready to help secure the strait once shipping resumes.
France and Britain are “ready to act very quickly,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told a radio station Monday morning. He said the two countries and their allies would “do everything” necessary to ensure a resumption of normal shipping of oil and other goods around the world, without fear of attacks or any requirement to pay tolls.
“There are many other straits in the world,” Mr. Macron said. “If we charge a toll every time, what will the consequence be? You’ll drive up prices for the entire world.”
As a Group of 7 meeting began on Monday in France, Europeans said their assets would be sent into the strait only once it was clear the cease-fire agreement would hold, unlike the false starts that led to a resumption of military strikes in recent months. Officials said the memorandum of understanding between the two countries had not been made public for governments to examine.
Already, early signs of disagreement between the United States and Iran emerged on Monday when a spokesman for the Iranian foreign minister challenged President Trump’s claim that the strait would be “permanently” toll-free.
“We are not seeking to levy transit tolls; however, fees will be charged in exchange for the services that are provided,” Esmaeil Baghaei, the spokesman, said in a statement issued by Iran’s state media.
As the G7 leaders assembled in Évian-les-Bains, France, the issue of toll-free passage underscored the anxiety among Europeans about the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which most of them opposed. Most of their nations stayed on the sidelines of the three-and-a-half-month conflict, enraging Mr. Trump, who accused them of cowardice.
Britain and France instead assembled a coalition of nations that pledged to help ensure a long-lasting peace once the fighting stopped. But the details of what the coalition would do, how much risk it would take, and how long the militaries would stay in the strait have not been publicly stated.
Those questions are becoming more urgent as it appears that the time may have arrived for the Europeans to begin making good on their promises.
In a statement on Monday, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy said that her country was “ready, together with our other partners and subject to the necessary parliamentary authorization, to contribute to an international naval presence to support the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”
But in an interview this month, Guido Crosetto, Italy’s defense minister, cautioned that the country would commit troops and equipment only if it was safe.
“No country can enter into the conflict without being sure that their ships — which can’t even defend themselves — won’t be bombed,” Mr. Crosetto said at the time. “Minesweepers aren’t warships. They’re ships which are used for demining. So it must be certain that no one will attack them.”
On Monday, European foreign affairs officials were gathering in Luxembourg, where one topic brought up was Operation Aspides, a European mission started in February 2024 to protect commercial vessels in the Red Sea from attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. For months, European Union officials have floated the idea of expanding it to help with the situation in Hormuz once the fighting stopped.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said at a news conference on Monday that the cease-fire announcement by United States and Iran was “a potential breakthrough.” But she said that Operation Aspides would remain focused on the Red Sea and that “the Franco-German coalition then will operate in the Strait of Hormuz.” She said that the two operations “go hand in hand and complement each other.”
Another subject discussed in Brussels — and likely to be on the agenda in France — is the question of the economic sanctions recently reimposed on Iran.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, said at a news conference at the G7 in France that the E.U.’s sanctions on Iran addressed two main issues: human rights violations and weapons of mass destruction.
“The principle of sanctions is that we need real change on the ground before we can think about lifting them,” she said.
Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, and his government are open to lifting sanctions on Iran as part of the deal, provided Iran complies with terms. But officials stressed that any such relief must be approved by the full European Union.
Germany will wait for the signing of the agreement on Friday to take concrete steps, German officials said on Monday.
Reporting was contributed by Mark Landler from Evian, France; Jim Tankersley from Bern, Switzerland; Jeanna Smialek from Brussels and Motoko Rich from Rome.
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7) This New Party Wants to Write a New Future for Israel
By Mairav Zonszein, June 16, 2026
Ms. Zonszein, a contributing Opinion writer, wrote from Tel Aviv.
Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
On April 4, hundreds of Israelis went out to protest the war with Iran in Tel Aviv. The enduring image of that day was that of a Jewish Israeli activist, Alon-Lee Green. “We’ll continue resisting this war. This is a futile war!” he screamed into a camera as the police dragged him away.
Mr. Green is known for his work with Standing Together, a group he runs alongside his Palestinian counterparts Rula Daoud and Sally Abed. It’s a grass-roots activist movement of young Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens that began organizing in 2015, focused on principles of anti-occupation, antiracism and social justice.
Voices like Mr. Green, Ms. Abed and Ms. Daoud that call not only for an end to war but for peace and reconciliation, and insist on the humanity of Palestinians in Israel and occupied territory alike, are on the fringe among Jews in Israeli society. Most Jewish Israelis support the wars in Iran and Lebanon, and the vast majority of all Israeli adults — certainly Jews, and to a lesser extent Palestinians — do not think a two-state solution is possible.
It is into this gaping void that a new joint Israeli-Palestinian political party lands ahead of the watershed elections set to be held in Israel this fall. Called A Place for Us All, and headed in part by the three leaders of Standing Together, the party is unlikely to have enough votes to run in the election. And that is precisely why it is a critical and defiant voice entering the political arena.
Arab-Jewish parties have struggled to gain a foothold in Israeli politics. There have been Arab parties in Israel with Jewish members, and Jewish parties with a few Arab members, but these are outliers. For nearly 50 years, the only functional Arab-Jewish party in the country has been Hadash, founded in 1977, which wants an end to the Israeli occupation and a two-state solution. But most of its members and supporters are Palestinian citizens of Israel, not Israeli Jews. Another party, Da’am, was established in 1995 as an Arab-Jewish party focused on workers’ rights and the creation of a welfare state, but it has never had enough votes to secure a seat in the Knesset.
A Place for Us All was born out of joint Jewish-Palestinian activism and organizing focused on the daily realities on the ground, not grandiose policies. These are young Palestinian and Jewish Israelis who are friends, and witness one another’s pain, struggles and hopes. Its very existence challenges the long-held idea that it is normal or makes sense for Palestinians to vote just for Palestinian parties or for Jews to vote just for Jewish parties, regardless of the issues at stake.
“I’ve never felt truly represented by the existing parties,” said Yonatan Zeigen, a peace activist and member of the new party whose mother, Vivian Silver, was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. “We aim not just to impact reality from within the establishment but to change it altogether.”
The activists from Standing Together came into public view particularly after the attacks of Oct. 7. Their firm stance against the war in Gaza from the very start and their provocative protest actions — such as storming a live broadcast of “Big Brother” wearing T-shirts that said, “Get out of Gaza,” and organizing to protect aid trucks into Gaza that were being sabotaged by right-wing Israelis during the height of what the organization I work for has identified as a campaign of starvation by Israel in Gaza — put them on the radar of mainstream Israelis.
During the Iran war, they have raised money to purchase mobile shelters for Palestinian Bedouin communities in Israel’s south that lack bomb shelters due to state negligence. They participate in protests against rising organized crime in Palestinian-Israeli communities. In the occupied West Bank, they send Israelis to accompany Palestinians to try to prevent settler and military attacks, as well as document the violence.
Standing Together has also worked to embolden Palestinian citizens politically. An estimated 75 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel ages 18 to 25, as well as about 60 percent of Palestinian women overall, said they did not plan to vote, according to a 2025 survey by the pollster Yousef Makladeh. Sally Abed, a Palestinian leader of Standing Together who is also on the City Council in the Israeli city of Haifa, says one of the goals of the new party is to reach those Palestinian citizens. “They want to see themselves represented in politics,” Ms. Abed said.
Mr. Green says Israel needs a new political party that sets out a clear path to offset the right’s explicit policies of — as he described it — “destruction, ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and even territorial expansion in Syria and Lebanon.” Mr. Green criticized the center and left parties for continuing to manage the conflict and evade or stave off the Palestinian issue. “We are at a historical juncture: Jewish and Palestinian citizens need to be offered a decisive plan that champions life, equality and Israeli-Palestinian peace,” he said.
For many in Israel, the coming election, expected to be held in early fall, is shaping up, once again, to be a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu. Will Israel vote out its longest-serving, domineering prime minister, the one who presided over the country during the deadliest attack in its history on Oct. 7, and who has since kept it in a constant state of war and failed to deliver either victory or security? Despite many Israelis’ dissatisfaction with and distrust of Mr. Netanyahu, at best, and their detestation of him, at worst, polls show voters still don’t see anyone more suitable to lead the country. His political survival, whether he manages it by cobbling together enough votes to form another coalition or by blocking the opposition from doing so, is entirely plausible.
The driving forces behind the opposition’s inability to unseat this unpopular leader are intertwined. One is the fact that on core issues regarding the Palestinians and Iran, opposition parties aren’t offering an alternative to the status quo. The other is the refusal by almost all Jewish Israeli parties to consider a coalition with Palestinian Arab parties, at least publicly. This, too, is an extension of the consistent exclusion of the Palestinian minority from political and civic spheres in Israel.
Israeli political polling is a stark illustration of the problem. In most mainstream polling, voters are funneled into three distinct groups: those who support coalition parties, those who support opposition parties and “the Arabs.” But Arabs, who make up 20 percent of the population, are just as politically diverse and fragmented as Israeli Jews. Thus a key division in Israeli politics runs along ethnic and national lines, rather than civic or policy lines.
This election is much more than a referendum on Mr. Netanyahu. It is a referendum on whether Israelis will continue to choose being Jewish over being democratic. For many Jewish Israelis, the focus will fall on the Netanyahu government’s war on liberal institutions, the news media and the courts, as well as the country’s growing isolation and pariah status.
For Palestinian citizens, the moment is existential. They have endured an unchecked spike in homicides, in large part because of organized crime in Arab cities inside Israel, that has undermined people’s sense of personal security; experienced exclusion, censorship and persecution in Israeli society as structural inequalities inside Israel harden; and watched their compatriots in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza try to survive the aggression of a government on an apparent mission to destroy or hinder Palestinian life.
A Place for Us All understands its limits to have a direct political impact in the election. Its members don’t want to compete over the same small pie of leftist, anti-Netanyahu votes. Instead, this is a party that is trying to reframe the conversation. The very basic concept that Palestinians and Jews who live and share space in Israel can and should work together is a compelling and necessary response to the hate, racism and violence that have become all too familiar in the daily Israeli landscape.
“I see our mission as trying to redefine what it means to be a patriot,” Ms. Abed said. “I want to figure out how to reconcile my love of this place with a love of the people.”
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8) We Interviewed Over 100 Dissidents and Activists. This Is the Secret to Resisting Trump.
By Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer, June 16, 2026
Ms. Angwin and Mr. Fields-Meyer are the authors of the forthcoming book “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear,” from which this essay is adapted.
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
It’s tempting to feel despondent about the state of American democracy. The propulsive pace of the Trump administration’s lawlessness — defying court orders, prosecuting political enemies, stealing power from Congress — often feels unstoppable. In the early days of the new administration, we often wondered whether Americans were too complacent, too comfortable, too numb or too afraid to turn back the authoritarian tide.
But after spending a year interviewing more than 100 dissidents and activists on five continents, we believe that American resistance is stronger than you might realize.
There are a range of proven ways to defeat a leader who has little regard for the rule of law, and people across the United States are taking part in many of them, forming a wellspring of defiance that is vivid, dynamic and growing every day.
Nearly every dissident we interviewed — whether a student in the Democratic Republic of Congo who helped pressure an aspiring authoritarian leader into stepping down or a Venezuelan mother working to validate a true ballot count in a rigged election — told us that the key to fighting authoritarianism isn’t a single political strategy or protest march. It’s the willingness of individuals to engage in what the political scientist Maria J. Stephan calls “collective stubbornness”: people working together to increase the costs of authoritarian behavior, throwing enough sand in the gears of the state that its operations sputter and eventually fail.
Collective stubbornness looks like Minneapolis, where residents banded together to protect their neighbors from ICE raids, eventually helping to drive the immigration police to retreat from the city. It looks like New Haven, Conn., where unions, faith groups and community leaders withheld their business, supported local legislation, pressured financial backers and eventually led Avelo Airlines to end its contract flying deportation flights for the federal government. It looks like the underground networks of everyday citizens helping trans people flee states that have criminalized key aspects of transgender life.
Each is an example of a maneuver familiar to those who have fought tyranny abroad. At precisely the moment conventional wisdom would say to retreat into the ease of a smaller, more cautious, more guarded life, people facing authoritarianism made their community bigger.
An authoritarian regime is at its most powerful when its leaders manage to scare its citizens into compliance. Defeating it is a numbers game: The more people who join a resistance movement, the more likely it is to succeed. According to research led by a Harvard Kennedy School professor, Erica Chenoweth, movements generally prevail when at least 3.5 percent of a population participated in nonviolent opposition.
That 3.5 percent must do more than just show up at a single protest march. As the veteran Serbian activist Srdja Popovic, who helped lead a movement that brought down President Slobodan Milosevic at the turn of the 21st century, wrote in his book “Blueprint for Revolution”: “The big rally isn’t the spark that launches your movement. It’s actually the victory lap.”
Authoritarians deliberately target marginalized groups, knowing that they will rarely be large enough to topple a regime. A serious opposition movement demands that people who are not in the political cross hairs intervene on behalf of those who are. These interventions don’t have to be heroic. They can be small, specific and social.
After the 2024 presidential election, Stephanie Campos, a research administrator in New Jersey, was “just raging in my apartment, doom scrolling, reading articles obsessively online.” Restless and anxious to take action, she signed up with a local pro-democracy group. But when a volunteer assisting families outside Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in Newark, came looking for locals who could help with Spanish translation, the “lightbulb went on for me,” said Ms. Campos, who is bilingual. “This is something that I can do.”
On her first day, Ms. Campos helped translate exchanges between the guard at the front gate and the families waiting outside. She could hardly believe the conditions they described inside — inedible food, freezing rooms with no blankets, and lack of sufficient due process (the Department of Homeland Security has denied these claims). Soon, she was driving families who needed transport to the detention center, in an isolated industrial site, and accompanying children inside to see their parents.
These days, Ms. Campos works her 9-to-5 job and then puts in a second shift on nights and weekends coordinating volunteer drivers and helping families navigate the center’s ever-changing visiting rules. Volunteers also provide diapers, baby formula, grocery store gift cards and other essentials to help families that have lost their wage earner.
When advocates and family members said that detainees inside Delaney Hall resorted to a hunger strike last month, demanding better medical care, decent food and water, and sanitary bathrooms, Ms. Campos and her fellow volunteers helped broadcast their message via round-the-clock vigils outside the walls. When DHS temporarily barred visitors, citing the protests outside the facility, volunteers including Ms. Campos relocated to a nearby church where they handed out supplies to families.
The detainees haven’t yet achieved all of their goals, but they have brought visibility to what they say are abysmal conditions. (Department of Homeland Security officials said there was no hunger strike.) Politicians have been demanding entry to the center and calling for its closure. ICE has released some youths and pregnant women who were incarcerated there. The New Jersey attorney general is suing to require access for health inspections.
Many Americans are still struggling to find the best way to defy the Trump administration by searching for the ideal protest to attend or the right vote to cast.
But resistance starts with a decision that is as much spiritual as it is political. Even when it is hard and risky to do so, expand the bounds of whom you are committed to. Reconsider whom you feel responsible for.
What is needed now isn’t just an action checklist, but a new orientation — a posture for daily life. The people who survive political repression, and the movements that protect democratic institutions, are those able to redefine who they mean by “we.”
“Authoritarianism is about how we can do less for each other and still feel OK about it,” said Remelya Jackalope, the founder of the Transcendence Care Network, which helps trans people relocate inside the United States. “A key piece of fighting against authoritarianism is asking the question, ‘What more can we do for each other?’”
Now all of us should ask ourselves the same.
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9) Their Country Revoked Their Citizenship, Then Tried to Expel Them to Iran
Amid the war with Iran, Bahrain has stripped 69 people of their citizenship, including children, accusing them of disloyalty and rendering them stateless.
By Vivian Nereim and Nazeeha Saeed, June 17, 2026
Vivian Nereim reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Nazeeha Saeed from Berlin.
The phone calls that upended their lives came during a family lunch, or while they were at the gym. One man heard the news from a friend, who told him to rush to the bank to withdraw his savings while he still could.
Some of them thought it was a joke, at first. Then Bahrain’s state news agency published their names, confirming that they and their children were among 69 people whose citizenship had been revoked.
Officials in Bahrain, the Persian Gulf monarchy that these families called home, were accusing them of disloyalty during the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. A government statement on April 27 described them as individuals of “non-Bahraini origin” who were being stripped of their nationality for “glorifying or sympathizing with hostile Iranian acts.”
For weeks, Bahrain had been arresting people on similar accusations. Some had shared videos online showing missile and drone attacks that Iran had launched at Bahrain, a close U.S. ally that hosts a major American naval base.
The accusations were bewildering for many of the 69 people, whose Persian ancestors had settled in Bahrain, an island nation in the Gulf, generations ago. Some of them told The New York Times that they had no idea why their names were on the list and, having no other nationality, were now stateless.
Within days of the announcement, Bahraini officials summoned the male head of each family, confiscated all of their identification documents and forced them to buy plane tickets to Iran, according to eight people interviewed by The Times.
The people who detailed their ordeals either had their own citizenship revoked or were the parents of children who had lost their citizenship. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing further retribution from the Bahraini government. Where possible, their accounts were corroborated by viewing documents, boarding passes and photographs from their journeys.
The Bahraini government did not respond to request for comment or detailed questions about the cases of the 69 people. The move to strip them of their citizenship follows a shift toward deeper authoritarianism in several of the Gulf Arab monarchies that has been accelerated by the regional war.
Home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, Bahrain is ruled by a Sunni Muslim royal family. A majority of its citizens, however, are Twelver Shiites, members of a branch of Islam that is Iran’s state religion.
The 69 people whose citizenship was revoked were all Shiites with Persian ancestry, according to Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, the director of advocacy for the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, a human rights group in London.
The Bahraini government has long accused Iran of meddling in its internal affairs and stirring up dissent among Shiites, who complain of discrimination.
Bahrain also has a long history of crushing dissent. In 2011, the authorities violently put down a pro-democracy uprising and, since then, have revoked the citizenship of hundreds of people — a move that human rights organizations say has become a tool for political repression.
Those revocations were subject to a court process, allowing people to appeal. But a recent royal decree declared citizenship in Bahrain a “sovereign matter,” removing judicial oversight for revocations and leaving no avenue for appeal.
All of the eight people interviewed said that Bahraini officials had refused to tell their families what misdeeds they had allegedly committed, and did not allow them to challenge the decision. Many of them were deported so swiftly that they did not have time to sell their homes and cars or pack up their belongings, they said.
“Everything I built in my life has gone with the wind,” said Ali Abdulnabi, 31, who was expelled from Bahrain in early May along with his wife and newborn daughter, and believes he was targeted over a video he shared on social media on the first day of the war, showing smoke rising from an area of Bahrain that was near a U.S. military facility.
He said he was now trapped in Azerbaijan, where most of the families were sent en route to Iran. “I’m living in a state of extreme anxiety, fear and panic,” he said.
On May 1, Bahrain’s king, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, delivered scathing remarks implying that the people whose nationality had been revoked were traitors.
“His Majesty stressed that those who betray the nation do not deserve the honor of belonging to it or the privilege of living on its land,” the state news agency reported.
“His Majesty added that stability will not be restored, nor will normal life resume, until ranks are cleansed of every traitor and accomplice,” it also wrote.
Bahrain is not the only country to have pursued mass citizenship withdrawals in recent years, but the phenomenon appears to be especially prevalent in Gulf countries. Kuwait, for instance, has stripped tens of thousands of people of their citizenship in recent years as its leaders dramatically reshape their definition of what it means to be Kuwaiti.
Even so, the April revocations in Bahrain were highly unusual, said Mr. Alwadaei, the rights activist, who was himself stripped of his citizenship in 2015. The authorities had never taken such a step against entire families before, he said, adding that the 69 names released in April included children as young as a few months old. And before the war with Iran, it was rare for them to expel those stripped of citizenship, he said.
When the list of 69 names came out in late April, Mr. Abdulnabi, the man now stranded in Azerbaijan, was at work, he said, and did not notice that he and his three-month-old daughter were on the list. Soon after, he said, he was summoned by the authorities and forced to surrender his passport, national ID card and driver’s license, along with his daughter’s passport.
He pressed the officials to tell him why, to no avail, he said. When they said that he would be expelled to Iran, he was shocked.
“I have no connection to Iran. I am not a supporter of Iran,” Mr. Abdulnabi said. “I have been stripped of my nationality and citizenship on pretexts I don’t understand.”
Several of the people said they had begged the officials to let them travel elsewhere — pointing out that Iran was at war and that they had no legal right to reside there and no place to stay once they arrived.
The officials refused to bend, they said.
The first group of people to be expelled was issued temporary travel documents and forced to buy flights to Iran via Turkey, but Turkish authorities turned them back, according to several of the people who were interviewed.
After that, most of the people were issued new passports, valid for one year only, and told to travel to Iran via Azerbaijan, several of the people said.
They had roughly one week to try to settle their affairs in Bahrain. They resigned from their jobs, bade farewell to loved ones and packed whatever they could fit into a handful of suitcases, they said.
After arriving in Azerbaijan, several of the families obtained visas to travel to Britain or other European countries, where they have applied for asylum, they said. They are now awaiting decisions on their cases, their fates unclear.
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10) After G7 Leaders Praise U.S.-Iran Deal, Trump Threatens Iran Again
President Trump said the United States would resume bombing Iran if he did not like how the preliminary agreement was implemented, hours after leaders from the Group of 7 nations called the deal a “breakthrough.”
By Leo Sands, Erica L. Green, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Jeanna Smialek, June 17, 2026
President Trump and other leaders of the G7 countries in Évian-les-Bains, France, on Wednesday. Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
President Trump oscillated on Wednesday between praising the preliminary agreement with Iran as a “very strong deal” and threatening to resume bombing if he was unhappy with its implementation, hours after world leaders at the annual Group of 7 summit hailed it as a “breakthrough.”
In remarks to reporters as he sat alongside President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt during the summit, Mr. Trump cast investors’ reaction as evidence of the deal’s success, then pivoted to escalatory language. “If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head,” he said.
Mr. Trump, who has been fixated on proving that former President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran deal was weaker than the one he is negotiating, also became angry and used a denigrating term to characterize Iranian attitudes toward his predecessor. “They laughed at Obama, and they said he’s a stupid son of a bitch,” he said.
Hours earlier, the G7 leaders issued a joint statement praising Mr. Trump’s leadership in securing the deal with Iran, as they gathered for the second full day of the summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, a resort town on the shores of Lake Geneva.
The statement, an unexpectedly firm declaration of agreement among many of the world’s leading powers, said that the preliminary deal — the terms of which have not been released — between the U.S. and Iran provided a “historic opportunity to prevent Iran from acquiring any nuclear weapon.” But amid uncertainty about what the deal entails, the leaders also noted that there must be “a robust and comprehensive diplomatic follow-on agreement” to the memorandum that top officials from the U.S. and Iran are expected to sign in Switzerland on Friday.
In his remarks later, Mr. Trump sought to cast the preliminary deal in glowing terms, even as he acknowledged that its terms have not been made public. “Nobody knows what it is, but it’s very strong,” he said. “Most people seem to be very happy.” He pointed to investor sentiment as a crucial barometer: “Who’s really happy is the market.”
With its combination of caution and flattery directed toward the American president, the statement from G7 leaders captured the tone of this week’s summit on its final day. The gathering has been surprising so far for its cordiality, even as leaders tackle weighty and often contentious subjects.
Mr. Trump has struck a friendly tone toward European leaders whom he has a history of mocking and criticizing, even praising President Emmanuel Macron of France and speaking enthusiastically about a dinner they are set to have Wednesday night at the Palace of Versailles, the lavish estate of French royalty. They, in turn, have showered him with compliments and even gifts.
Yet the discussions have still been tense. The leaders from some of the world’s richest countries were discussing on Wednesday the global economy — a topic that is likely to include discussion of China — and the contentious question of how to regulate artificial intelligence.
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11) A Big Moment for American Catholics Is Coming
By Kathleen Sprows Cummings, June 17, 2026
Dr. Cummings is a historian of Catholicism.
Naila Ruechel for The New York Times
On Saturday, Pope Leo XIV plans to visit the northern Italian village of Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, where he will venerate a saint close to his heart: Mother Frances Cabrini, who was born there in 1850 and died in 1917 in Chicago, the pope’s hometown. When the Catholic Church canonized Cabrini 29 years later — speedy for a painstaking process that can last centuries — she became the first American saint.
Leo’s visit would seem to be a ready-made occasion for a celebration of Catholicism in the United States, but that would miss the point. Leo and Cabrini are linked by something far more profound than their common U.S. citizenship: a shared global sensibility, developed by their own passages across borders, cultures and continents, that inspired a commitment to people building new lives in distant lands.
The pope’s Cabrini pilgrimage, like his election to the chair of Peter, is an invitation to Americans to see themselves as global citizens while their government appears to be retreating into political, cultural and economic isolation.
It’s fine for Americans to celebrate the creation of a homegrown pope. (Italian cities and villages have had that chance 217 times, after all!) But it would be even better if Americans adopted the lessons Leo and Cabrini learned from personal experience: that people, problems, goods and ideas flow freely across political boundaries, and as a consequence, the world’s challenges — climate change, public health crises, wars and economic instability — can’t be understood, let alone solved, simply on a local or national level.
Chiefly among these issues is migration, one of the world’s most urgent global challenges. While in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano, Leo will surely call attention to the matter by highlighting Cabrini’s lifelong ministry to migrants during an earlier era of mass displacement. His message will inevitably draw comparisons to President Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign, of which Leo has been a critic.
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As the founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Cabrini made dozens of ocean journeys between 1889 and 1912, establishing 67 schools, orphanages and hospitals on three continents. The sisters had at first set out to minister to migrants from Italy, but before long their work came to embrace newcomers of all origins.
In his homily at the 1946 canonization Mass, Pope Pius XII praised the new saint for extending “a friendly hand, a sheltering refuge, relief and help” to people uprooted from their native countries. Pius suggested Cabrini’s international outlook rendered her an agent of peace and reconciliation in a world torn apart by conflict.
That message was drowned out in the United States. Instead, Cabrini’s canonization was celebrated as a national triumph. Her boosters pushed her American identity, ascribing to her a special love for the United States and insisting that she had become a naturalized citizen out of a desire to ally herself with its greatness. (In reality, the practical Cabrini had most likely been following her lawyer’s advice.)
The church presented Cabrini as a model of a woman who transcended national borders. Yet together with their fellow citizens, U.S. Catholics anointed her the unofficial patron saint of American exceptionalism.
Like Cabrini did, Pope Leo has lived for extended periods in Italy, the United States and South America. Also like she did, he traveled widely and became an adopted citizen of a country in which he had long served; for him it was Peru. Perhaps the most striking commonality between the first American pope and the first American saint is also the most instructive: Their U.S. citizenship means or meant far more to other U.S. citizens than to the rest of the world or, for that matter, to either of them.
It seemed that Leo’s U.S. citizenship barely registered with the cardinals who voted for him. Throughout his years in Peru, his travels as head of the Augustinian order and his work at the Vatican’s department overseeing bishops and their selection, he cultivated a global perspective that helped shatter the unspoken taboo within the Vatican of a U.S. pope. However ardently Leo might cheer for the White Sox or savor Chicago pizza, he stopped viewing the world primarily through an American lens long ago.
That might explain why he did not speak English during his first appearance as pope, or why he is pointedly choosing to travel to Lampedusa, the Italian island where so many migrants have landed, on July 4, rather than join the patriotic spectacle surrounding America’s 250th birthday celebrations. The sentiment, I suspect, that Cabrini said propelled her far from Sant’Angelo Lodigiano resonates with Leo: “The world is too small,” she wrote in 1887, “to limit ourselves to one point; I want to embrace it entirely and to reach all its parts.”
Eighty years ago, flush from victory in World War II, Americans could blithely ignore Pope Pius’s characterization of Cabrini as a global saint. Today, from a far more precarious perch in the world, they overlook the example of this global pope at their peril. The deeper lesson of the first U.S. pontiff may be that our interdependent world has become, in Cabrini’s words, “too small” for bygone fantasies of American exceptionalism.
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12) The Deck Is Stacked Against Healthy Eating
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, June 17, 2026
“A 2023 study published in the journal Nature Communications indicated that ‘73 percent of the U.S. food supply is ultraprocessed.’ In a Times Opinion guest essay from September, Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall explained that ‘the root cause of America’s chronic disease crisis’ is ‘our toxic food environment.’ The endless array of hyper-palatable and always available foods disrupts our internal signals around satiety. ‘Our bodies weren’t designed for a calorie onslaught, in the same way a house built for moderate weather isn’t designed for a heat wave,’ Belluz and Hall wrote.”
Eleanor Davis
I spent last week close reading a special section of The American Journal of Public Health dedicated to ultraprocessed foods and corporate influence, and talking to some of the researchers behind these articles. While much of this information has been public for decades, seeing it all in one place is sobering, and maddening. As the days wore on and I started looking at the studies, I found myself experiencing the same kind of impotent, disgusted rage that I have felt when reporting on Big Tech.
Big Food and Big Tech know that the products they are marketing to children are not healthy in a variety of ways. Much as Meta, Snapchat and TikTok knew that students were using social media during school hours and did nothing to stop it, the tobacco giant Philip Morris — which owned Kraft Foods from 1988 to 2007 — used the research, development and marketing strategies it honed to sell cigarettes to hook schoolchildren on sodium-and-sugar-laden products.
We know as much as we do about the way the food industry targets kids with unhealthy food because of the trove of documents released by lawsuits against tobacco companies. Some of the papers in The American Journal of Public Health relied on a trove of over 19 million documents released through class action litigation against the tobacco industry and digitized by the University of California San Francisco.
Through her years of work analyzing these documents, Laura A. Schmidt, a professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at U.C.S.F., discovered that Philip Morris used what the company called “technical synergies” between its tobacco and food products. Her paper in The American Journal of Public Health focuses on the development and marketing of Lunchables.
For those of you who weren’t in elementary school in the late ’80s, Lunchables combine processed meats, cheeses and breads in stackable piles in a plastic tray. These “synergies” included chemical additives and “flavor encapsulation technology,” also used in cigarettes and other packaged foods.
“Philip Morris applied its ‘better for you’ reformulation strategy, first used to create filtered Marlboro cigarettes, to develop Low-Fat Lunchables in efforts to keep consumers worried about childhood obesity loyal to the brand,” in the mid-90s, Schmidt’s paper notes — but these “healthier” Lunchables weren’t much more nutritious than the originals, even if they were lower in fat.
You can see food brands using similar strategies today to appeal to health-conscious, MAHA-adjacent consumers: taking the artificial dyes out of chips and cereals, for instance. But those products often contain other additives that make them “hyper-palatable,” thanks to a combination of sodium, sugar, fat and carbohydrates that also make them easier to overeat.
I had already been frustrated with how difficult it is as a parent to have my daughters consume mostly healthy, nourishing foods, without encouraging restrictive or disordered eating, or making packaged foods some kind of forbidden fruit. I cook at home nearly every night and read food labels before buying anything, and I still feel ill equipped and trapped fighting multiple bad outcomes.
I also know that much of the food outside my home is junk, and I can’t (and don’t want to) control what my kids eat when they’re at friends’ homes or buying their own snacks. A 2023 study published in the journal Nature Communications indicated that “73 percent of the U.S. food supply is ultraprocessed.”
In a Times Opinion guest essay from September, Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall explained that “the root cause of America’s chronic disease crisis” is “our toxic food environment.” The endless array of hyper-palatable and always available foods disrupts our internal signals around satiety. “Our bodies weren’t designed for a calorie onslaught, in the same way a house built for moderate weather isn’t designed for a heat wave,” Belluz and Hall wrote.
Luckily there are a ton of policy ideas that could improve our food environment. George Washington University’s Global Food Institute just released a road map for reducing added sugar in American children’s diets.
These suggestions include asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to further reduce the cap on added sugar in school and day care food like flavored milk and yogurt, taxing sweetened beverages, restricting the marketing to children of foods with poor nutritional value and encouraging the Food and Drug Administration to finalize a proposed rule that would highlight products that are high in added sugar.
Many people don’t know how much added sugar is in everyday products like breads, cereals and pasta sauces, Priya Fielding-Singh, the director of policy and programs at the Global Food Institute, told me. Without even giving your children dessert, they can exceed the amount of added sugar recommended by the American Heart Association, Fielding-Singh said.
Schmidt, the U.C.S.F. professor, also mentioned improved food labeling as a policy fix that the United States should adopt. First, “we need a regulatory definition of ultraprocessed food,” she said. In the June 12 edition of Helena Bottemiller Evich’s Food Fix newsletter, Evich quotes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, as saying the definition is imminent and that once it is finalized, “we’re going to go to front-of-package labeling … the model that we’re looking at right now is a red light, green light, yellow light.”
This type of food labeling system, based on the amount of fat, sugar and salt, is in place in some other countries. Green means the food has the lowest levels, yellow is in the middle, and a food labeled red has the highest levels.
However “ultraprocessed” is ultimately defined, the food industry will most likely push back. In West Virginia, a state that was among the first to ban certain artificial food dyes, the International Association of Color Manufacturers sued and successfully blocked the law for the time being.
Though Kennedy has been promising to address ultraprocessed foods for years as a key part of his Make America Healthy Again movement, we have seen him make compromises before when his long-held beliefs conflict with the Trump administration’s business interests.
It is also worth noting that Republican policies are making healthy eating more expensive, and potentially out of reach for the poorest Americans. “The House of Representatives recently passed legislation proposing to cut $141 million from the vegetable and fruit allowance in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children,” the Bloomberg columnist Abby McCloskey wrote on Monday, showing that Kennedy’s “eat real food” slogan will “ring hollow” if few can afford it.
Still, awareness of the downsides of ultraprocessed foods is rising. A majority of Americans surveyed, regardless of political party, said they believe that food companies should have to label ultraprocessed foods, be transparent about their harms and reduce the amount of sugar and salt in their products. “People in the United States broadly believe that U.P.F.s are harmful and addictive and are aligned in support of a variety of potential regulations,” the survey’s authors note.
We know the problem. We know the solutions. We just need our federal government to actually work for us.
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13) Unlikely Coalition Begins Campaign Against Billionaire Tax in California
A surprising array of left-leaning interest groups is trying to kill a wealth tax initiative before the November ballot is finalized. Gov. Gavin Newsom is at the center of negotiations.
By Laurel Rosenhall, Reporting from Sacramento, June 17, 2026
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who says taxing billionaires would hurt California’s dominance as the cradle of tech innovation, is trying to pull it off the ballot before a deadline on June 25. Max Whittaker for The New York Times
It was hardly a surprise when California billionaires revolted last year at a groundbreaking ballot proposal to tax their assets. Some left the state. Others tried to kill the tax by pouring millions of dollars into political advertising and competing ballot measures.
But now opposition is emerging from a far more surprising corner. Health care organizations and education groups that typically support higher taxes are rallying against the initiative just days before a deadline to remove it from the November ballot.
The new effort, which will be disclosed on Wednesday, comes from advocacy groups representing California doctors, health clinics and school boards. The organizations are seeding their campaign with $200,000, according to a spokesman, and are running a digital ad that blasts the measure as a “reckless wealth tax experiment.”
The groups say the onetime nature of the billionaire tax does not address their long-term funding needs. They also fear that the wealth tax would threaten their efforts to pass a tax that would generate a steadier stream of revenue.
“The very folks that it’s supposed to help aren’t supporting it,” said Francisco Silva, president of the California Primary Care Association, which represents health clinics.
The new campaign is believed to be the first political spending against the tax that is not from the wealthy people who would have to pay it. It is also the most visible sign yet that the proposed billionaire tax would scramble traditional alliances if it reached the ballot this fall.
The tax proposal is backed by a labor union, Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, and is expected to qualify for the ballot this week. It calls for a one-time, 5 percent tax on the assets of California billionaires to offset health care cuts that President Trump signed into law last year. The state would be required to spend 90 percent of the new revenues on health care and the rest on food assistance and education.
The initiative has already divided Democrats and labor unions. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who says taxing billionaires would hurt California’s dominance as the cradle of tech innovation, is trying to pull it off the ballot before a June 25 deadline.
The negotiations are complex. A grand compromise could involve several other ballot measures on taxes and health care already headed for the November ballot, as well as potential tax increases that the Legislature could approve as part of the state budget.
The health care workers union pushing for the tax said the school boards association was “carrying water for a few of the world’s most controversial billionaires” and criticized the groups representing doctors and clinics.
“Their complicity with billionaires at the expense of patient interests is no surprise,” Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff for the S.E.I.U.-U.H.W., said in a statement.
The campaign for the billionaire tax debuted earlier this year with rousing support from Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, who cast it as a righteous move to address income inequality and pay for health care. Tapping into populist angst, the union gathered 1.5 million signatures and received endorsements from the Teamsters and AFSCME unions.
But most Democrats who ran for governor this year opposed the tax, including Xavier Becerra, who is in a strong position to win as the only Democrat to reach the general election. Mr. Becerra said that wealthy Californians have not paid their fair share but that the state needed a predictable tax structure.
In recent weeks, many new opponents have emerged after Mr. Newsom worked behind the scenes to try to isolate the health care workers union. They include progressive groups such as the California Teachers Association and Planned Parenthood, as well as housing organizations, a hospital association and unions representing construction workers and police officers. The common thread among the diverging interests is fear that a one-time tax would hurt the state’s long-term finances.
“What we are looking for is stable, ongoing and durable revenue,” said Dustin Corcoran, chief executive of the California Medical Association, which represents doctors and is a funder of the new opposition campaign.
The doctors’ association and the teachers union are supporting a different ballot measure that would make permanent a tax hike on high earners that is set to expire in 2030. Supporters fear that voters might reject it if too many tax proposals are on the ballot.
Any deal to quash the billionaire tax would likely include an agreement to raise taxes in other ways for health care. On Monday, the State Assembly passed two bills that could become part of a deal. One would raise $1.4 billion next year by limiting corporate tax credits and extending a software tax. The other would change how California taxes managed-care health plans.
If the billionaire tax heads to the ballot this fall, Mr. Newsom’s office hopes that voters will see that many Democratic allies oppose it.
“This is not going to be, ‘Billionaires killed this wealth tax’ if it appears on the November ballot,” said Nathan Barankin, Mr. Newsom’s chief of staff. “It’s going to be Planned Parenthood, doctors, teachers and labor killed it.”
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14) The U.S. Economy Is Leaving These Companies Behind
Small businesses say relentless pressures from tariffs and higher energy prices have sapped their resilience and finances.
By Sydney Ember, June 17, 2026
Kirsten Davenport-Norwood, who owns Greene Thumb Landscape in Indianapolis. Kaiti Sullivan for The New York Times
After unrelenting economic shocks, small businesses around the country were feeling plucky at the start of the year.
Inflation was easing. Borrowing costs were coming down. Tax breaks were materializing. Even President Trump’s whipsawing tariff policy finally seemed to be getting more predictable.
That cheeriness has faded.
The monthslong war with Iran pushed up the cost of fuel and other materials. Inflation has accelerated. The prospect of further interest rate cuts before the end of the year is dimming.
Even as large corporations are posting solid earnings and the stock market is booming, small-business sentiment has plummeted in recent months. Lacking the funds to withstand an onslaught of financial gyrations, many smaller companies are instead rethinking their hiring and pausing any plans to expand — again.
The National Federation of Independent Business reported in May its lowest measure of economic expectations since Mr. Trump was elected to his second term. The Bank of America Institute reported that small-business profitability in April grew at its slowest pace in two years. Job openings at small companies have flatlined. On Sunday, Mr. Trump and Iranian officials announced a preliminary deal to end the war, though the economic consequences will probably linger for some time.
“It has been an incredible challenge for a small mom-and-pop operation to just simply keep the doors open,” said Bruce Jovaag, the owner of Norse Construction, a home remodeling company in Fenton, Mo., that he started in 2013. “It has been a fight like has never existed before.”
Mr. Jovaag, who is 68, said that he had loved the creative aspects of redesigning kitchens, bathrooms and other interior spaces, and that he had formed many meaningful long-term relationships with customers. But seemingly endless disruptions since the Covid-19 pandemic have “taken the enjoyment out of what I do for a living,” he said.
High interest rates slowed the housing market and deterred homeowners from renovating. Immigration enforcement exacerbated a worker shortage in the construction industry. Tariffs swelled the cost of plywood and other building materials. Last year, Mr. Jovaag’s sales, around $1 million in a good year, were down nearly 25 percent.
Although he received a $3,000 tax refund this year, that did not offset the $10,000 of his savings he put into the business last year to keep it afloat. Soaring gas prices, which have made driving to job sites more costly, have eaten further into his profits.
“It’s been a nightmare,” he said. “I’m ready to retire.”
The health of small businesses is critical to the American economy because they power employment and growth. Businesses with fewer than 500 employees account for nearly half of all employment and 55 percent of job creation, according to the Census Bureau.
Many owners were optimistic that the Trump administration would slash taxes and reduce regulations. Legislation that Mr. Trump signed into law last July made permanent the 20 percent tax deduction on business income for many owners. It also allowed them to deduct the cost of certain business investments all at once.
“America First policies are restoring the American dream on Main Street to new heights,” Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration, said last month during a small-business summit at the White House.
That hasn’t been the reality for the small-business owners who are still reeling from years of challenges, some of which have been compounded by tariffs and other policies introduced during Mr. Trump’s second term.
The persistent pressure has pushed some small businesses to the brink. Businesses with fewer than 10 workers have broadly been shedding employees for much of the past five years, according to data from QuickBooks, the accounting software company.
Bankruptcy filings for small businesses also rose last year in a pattern that suggested they were tied to tariff-related economic stress, said Edith Hotchkiss, a finance professor at Boston College. Using data from New Generation Research, a bankruptcy research firm, she found that bankruptcies for firms with less than $50,000 in liabilities had increased two to four months after the administration imposed new import duties.
“Prices are higher, and these small businesses don’t have the flexibility that larger firms do,” she said. “They don’t have the existing inventories that larger firms might have.”
“It’s only natural that these would be maybe the most vulnerable,” she added.
More recently, skyrocketing energy prices have ratcheted up the pain. Since the war in Iran began more than three months ago, a constrained supply of oil has resulted in higher fuel prices, which have raised the cost of transportation, shipping and some materials.
Wholesale prices — what businesses pay for goods and services — rose 1.1 percent in May and were up 6.5 percent from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The 12-month increase was the fastest since November 2022, evidence that elevated energy prices were working their way through the supply chain.
In a survey conducted in May and early June by the Small Business Majority, a nonprofit, three-quarters of business owners said the increases in fuel and transportation costs had affected them. More than a third said they had frozen hiring because of changes to expenses and other economic conditions this year, and roughly one in 10 had laid off workers.
Cost pressures, including higher energy prices, are “definitely the problem that we’re hearing most about right now,” said Holly Wade, the executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business’s research center.
Unlike tariffs, which have often been absorbed at least in part by wholesalers and suppliers, higher oil and gas prices are pummeling many small businesses directly.
“It’s really hitting their bottom line, and they’re having to pass those costs onto customers pretty quickly,” Ms. Wade said.
Francesca Costa, who with her fiancé runs a cafe in Houston called Cranky Carrot Juice, is among the business owners making difficult choices because of rising prices.
When she ran out of the tea that her company uses to make kombucha, she turned to a farm in Ecuador. She purchased about 100 kilograms for $440.
Getting the tea to Houston was another story. Shipping it by air was more expensive than she anticipated because of higher fuel prices. Import duties packed on cost. She said she had spent almost $1,000 on shipping and customs fees.
The cost of eggs and bacon that the company buys from local suppliers has also gone up. Shipping costs on glass bottles that it uses for juices have tripled.
Higher prices, along with expenses associated with opening a second location in downtown Houston in February, have pushed Ms. Costa and her fiancé to consider whether to keep the business going. She has already raised menu prices once this year — cold-pressed juices by 50 cents, smoothies by $1 — and is hesitant to do so again when consumers are pulling back spending on discretionary items like premium health food.
“We are very worried,” she said. “It is a very real possibility that we could also have to close.”
The coming months could bring some relief.
Energy prices are expected to fall if the war with Iran ends. And the labor market appears to be emerging from its period of stagnation, which could help small businesses that can respond nimbly to rising demand.
Gusto, a small-business payroll and benefits platform, said companies using its services had added 83,900 jobs in May, the fourth month in a row of hiring. Job growth occurred in nearly every sector.
These businesses “are looking at the future and seeing some sort of opportunity for themselves,” said Nich Tremper, a senior economist at Gusto.
Kirsten Davenport-Norwood, who owns Greene Thumb Landscape in Indianapolis, has seen the cost of mulch, concrete paving slabs and other materials balloon. Her clients include apartment complexes, parks and schools. Government budget cuts have meant that some that rely on funding have been unable to pay for services on time.
Last year, Ms. Davenport-Norwood and her husband, who together took over the business after her mother died four years ago, had to use their personal savings to pay workers because the company’s cash flow was so tight.
Ms. Davenport-Norwood is nervous about gas prices and the broader economic climate. For now, though, demand has held steady. There is “always grass to be mowed,” she said. She has jobs booked through August.
“I’m feeling really good about our organization right now,” she said.
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